The Threat of Y

The Threat of Y began with a conversation with a curator who told me she could not allow a man to be alone in a room with a woman. The assumption of male danger was so immediate that my presence as a performer became impossible. My Y chromosome, my physical form, became a threat in itself. The work was meant to explore silent transmission: sitting beside another person without speaking and seeing whether intention could be felt directly through proximity. Instead, the institution responded with protocols rooted in fear. The performance was relocated outside and witnessed by a crowd rather than enacted in its intended intimate setting. My body was treated like a hazard. This tension became the heart of the piece. The performance exposed the cultural coding of male presence, the anxieties surrounding intimacy, and the ways digital-age fears have reshaped how we interpret strangers. I ultimately did not show up for the original staging. My absence became part of the work, a refusal that mirrored the institution's refusal of me. The Threat of Y confronts the sociological and psychological forces that frame male bodies as dangerous before they speak. It asks how fear shapes intimacy, and how a body can be both the performer and the problem.

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